Man in mom, daughter knifing gets prison

6  Azalyea Duran, 9, wanted “the bad man” to go to jail. On Tuesday, he was sentenced to 22 years to life in prison.

Daniel Hernandez, who last month admitted to murdering the girl’s mother, Antonia “Toni” Duran, was sentenced in Vista Superior Court. Hernandez, 28, also pleaded guilty to premeditated attempted murder for stabbing Azalyea after she woke up to find him attacking her mother at their San Marcos apartment on Dec. 18.

The girl screamed at him to stop, but Hernandez turned the knife on Azalyea, who was 8 at the time.

He stabbed her more than two dozen times, striking vital organs and leaving her for dead, Deputy District Attorney Tracy Prior said.

Duran’s son, Anthony Dalton, 23, came home about 3:30 a.m. and unknowingly passed his mother’s killer in the parking lot as Hernandez ran past him and yelled out, “What a fool.”

Dalton went into the apartment and found his mom covered in blood and his badly wounded half sister lying at her feet. “My sister just kept pleading, ‘Please help. Please help,’” said Dalton in a written statement read by a relative in court.

Authorities found Hernandez later that day at a coin laundry, washing his clothing and shoes.

Azalyea spent a week in a medically induced coma, waking up on Christmas Day.

The prosecutor told Judge K. Michael Kirkman that the motive for the attack “is still a mystery.” Hernandez and Duran, 41, were friends and had known each other for about two months.

Kirkman called the attack “so despicable, so horrendous.”

“You should never be released,” he said.

During the sentencing, Azalyea stepped into the courtroom briefly, holding the leash of a trained support dog named Kiwi, as a cousin read aloud a letter the girl had written to the judge.

“All I wanted was to save my mom,” Azalyea wrote.

August 27, 2013 Vista CA-- Azalyea Duran, 9, and another member of Teresa Garcia's family member give statements during the sentencing of 28-year-old Daniel Hernandez.
Alex Fuller

August 27, 2013 Vista CA-- Azalyea Duran, 9, and another member of Teresa Garcia's family member give statements during the sentencing of 28-year-old Daniel Hernandez.

She said Hernandez told her he would come back and kill her if she survived. She wrote of surgeries, of nightmares and of her fear of sleeping by herself.

“He is a bad man and I don’t want him to come out of jail. ... I will always be scared that he will come back to kill me,” Azalyea wrote in the letter read by Teresa Garcia.

“Please do not let Daniel Hernandez out, so I can live a kind of normal life,” the girl said. “I already lost my mommy and had to watch her die. My life will never be normal.”

At that point, Garcia started to cry. Azalyea handed Kiwi’s leash to her.

Prior called Azalyea “one of the bravest people you will ever meet.”

The girl still bears the scars of the attack, including one on her face. She has refused, for now, an offer from a cosmetic surgeon to try to remove the scars, Prior said, because they remind her of her mother. The girl also sometimes wears a locket with her mother’s ashes inside, the prosecutor said.

Azalyea now lives with her mother’s sister in San Marcos. Tuesday was her first day of fourth grade.